I believe they're saying that cryptocurrencies aren't inherently better than most assets - but NFTs are such inane garbage that you could argue cryptocurrencies are 'better'. Very much damning with faint praise.

Well now you're getting into what 'worth' means. As a kid I had a bunch of baseball cards that Becketts said were 'worth' $X. I took them to the local shop and they would only pay some value < $X. "But it says right here they are worth $X!" My grandfather was smiling and said you learned a valuable lesson that something is only worth whatever someone will pay.

NFTs are a bit like celebrity signatures. They are worth what someone will pay. If a celebrity verifiably digitally signs something and they only do it once, that is worth something to some people as a collectible. It is not worthless as long as someone is willing to pay something. And, like other collectibles the market can have huge swings and sometimes never recover (like all my baseball cards lol).

IMO most NFTS have a significant amount of flaws that weaken any potential value as a collectible, at least in the current popular implementations.

For one thing, they're by definition tied to a shitty blockchain and you have to deal with any potential bullshit affecting said chain including fees, slow transactions, potential scams, etc. For another, they're not really an object, just a bit of json pointing likely pointing towards a flat image hosted somewhere else (that anyone can freely access via the link). Sure, they enjoyed a brief popularity and lots of media attention, but already the NFT marketplace seems to be waking up to the reality that most of these "investments" will never turn a profit. And that's the real issue I see: most of these purchases were not someone who wanted to collect something, they were made by someone who wanted to invest in an asset that would later be worth something. And so the actual value as a "collectible" has been inflated and is due for a huge crash, which is already happening.

I know some are meant to carry benefits towards the holder, like exclusive access to X service or community... that is a small minority currently though, and many of those benefits are shaping up to be just empty promises, and even then an NFT seems like a poor vehicle for systems that could have been done better without any "decentralization" or crypto integration.

You are aware that nft are a link stored in a database and not the picture or whatever. The picture is on a server and can be deleted.. btw did happen en mass.

Yes. In my example it's not about what the NFT points to, but who signed/minted the NFT itself. That's why I used a celebrity signature as an example.

NFTs are worth nothing to me, but so are celebrity signatures. That doesn't mean they are generally worthless b/c people collect all sorts of stuff.

They have some value relative to the system they are found in. Consider some fungible tokens which still have value. Say gold coins in online video games. These have some value, even when trading them is against ToS and will get you banned. Their value is relative to their usefulness in the game, and as long as the game in enjoyable, people will assign them so value relative to the enjoyment they can extract. Nothing about the game must be engaged in. There are people who live their entire lives without ever touching an MMO, much less a specific one like WoW or Runescape. Yet fungible tokens still have some value within those ecosystems.

Mobile games have taken this much further, with people buying fungible tokens for hundreds of dollars for the enjoyment they get, though this has become questionable as more of the game is engineered towards feeding an addiction which will cause players to pay more for their enjoyment.

The issue is the approximate cap on this value. Even by the inflated standards of whales paying for mobile games, we still see a cap of value around $1,000s for a month of value. Thus an NFT that provides value in a similar ecosystem should be able to max out at a similar evaluation, assuming it is tied to a system with as much investment in the fun as the big hit mobile games (which is often quite a lot of investment compared to what any single player, even whale, is spending).

We see NFTs going for much more than that in systems that have far less investment in being enjoyable, which I think can be contributed to people investing to get rich by selling at an even higher price.

In conclusion, I think that NFTs can have some inherent value, as much as fungible tokens in a game can, but that such value would be far below where the market currently is. Someone should only spend as much on NFTs when the enjoyment they get from spending on NFTs matches the enjoyment that similar amounts of money would bring from their other hobbies.

Sidenote: the actual tulip bulbs were far less silly. They were a productive investment. You could plant them to make more bulbs.

You can stake crypto to make more crypto too!

Fair point - but you can't stake NFTs, can you?

Their selling price is on the blockchain, there is no practical reason why you can't. Valueing them might be a bit tricky though.

If not, somebody is feverishly writing an ERP now

I can use my Monopoly money to get more Monopoly money, too.

That’s the root of the scam!

One of the big appeals from crypto people is essentially “all money is bullshit, so buy my bullshit”. The even nuttier people would position Bitcoin as gold.